


Always Alone

by ThatEldritchBitch



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Purple Hawke, hawke's life kinda sucks, rogue!hawke - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-12
Updated: 2018-04-12
Packaged: 2019-04-22 02:25:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14298732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatEldritchBitch/pseuds/ThatEldritchBitch
Summary: rogue Hawke thoughts





	Always Alone

Father laughs, always laughing, watching his not-so-normal normal child throwing sticks at bottles, grinning when she hits one, spinning her in the air. Wasting away on the sheets, still smiling, keep your spirits up they’ll serve you well, she can stab everything except where it matters, a burial in a ground with blighted future. Daughter hitting bottles with knives now, aim impeccable, thunk thunk thunk _shatter_. An ale bottle: broken spirit. She laughs. 

Running with a brother with something to prove from a battle lost in betrayal to a cracked family, keep running before the demons catch up, surrounding, a scream as little brother is ripped from the festering earth, crunch. He was always so reckless. Knives have never moved so fast but she’s too late, the ogre falls but she’s too late and mother we have to go, always going from then on. She thinks of him sometimes, thinks of how he never got to be more than little brother, how all she has to protect her family now is too-slow knives and a bag of tricks. Flying by the seat of her pants. She laughs. 

They’re finally free, finally settled, a strange city, a new home, but this isn’t the home mother expects, isn’t the home mother deserves. Another trick, an opportunity to be where mother wants us to be and how could there be refusal when she has given so much for us just to be alive. How can there be refusal when mother begs to leave beloved little sister behind, beloved little sister burning brighter than the sun shines if she could only see how important she is, how important that at least mother always have one. She is left behind, a vision of darker man, of darker stone is seen, but _we are so close_ and we come bursting into the sky somehow alive, smiling, laughing, the first and last time everyone has got along. We _won_. Running home for family, desperate to see them again, show that she lives yet but so _slow_ , always so slow. Beloved little sister is taken by a man who believes her less than a person and the crack grows wider, lets something through: _over my dead body_! It’s okay, it is okay, big sister. Is it okay? She is alive but she is gone. Here but not here, locked where people are not trusted to be whole. Not much of a circle at all. She laughs. 

Growing closer to the one man who might set her sister free, had captivated her since the first time she had seen him explode with purpose, with destiny. He can free her, free them, but for all the good his hands can do, he can’t free the mother trapped by a lying chance at love and mother, mother and some others, dies in daughter’s arms. She lives by her speed but is never, never, NEVER fast enough. There is no healing this wound but magic, magic couldn’t save her and magic was used to kill her but it doesn’t matter when she thinks of little sister, people are people and all can kill and all can help. Something she’s the best at, as she recalls, though looking down at the shell in her arms, perhaps she’ll have to reconsider. Bodies flopping through the streets. This isn’t funny. She laughs anyway, hunched over and shaking. 

It is only when the one she trusted, the one she brought into her family, love and laughter and justice, yes, but also _hope_ , the one she thought he, at least, will always be here, a burning bright pillar in the storm, when he _lied_ , twisting words, playing on feelings, death, destruction, a world exploding around her ears, begging for a death a memory of passion, passion on and in the sheets, and the way his hands played across her after every battle, working her fear and pain away cannot give. She cannot laugh. She cannot move. She cannot strike. The howling choir is ignored as she stands there: even me, she whispers to herself. Even me. She helps and she kills as she must then she _runs_ and little sister cannot follow but _he_ does and, for now, that is enough. 

It is the first time slowness saved someone she loved, she thinks. She laughs but it’s really not the same.


End file.
